By JUDE DOUGHERTY
BOLD INSERT
Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, Enlarged Edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015. xxviii + 428 pp.
This is an old book, first published in 1958 but still relevant, that the University of Chicago Press has seen fit to reproduce in a new edition with a valuable foreword by the distinguished historian of science, Mary Jo Nye of Oregon State University.
Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) was a Hungarian-born chemist and philosopher who, after earning two degrees at the University of Budapest, a medical degree in 1913 and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1917, left Hungary to pursue a career in Germany. He subsequently became director of the chemical kinetics research group under Fritz Haber’s Institute for Physical Chemistry in Berlin.
He was in that position when Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor in 1933. As a Jew he reluctantly fled the Germany that had in his own account “treated him so well” when the Nazis began to implement their anti-Semitic laws.
Polanyi accepted an appointment to the University of Manchester, where he headed the university’s physical chemistry laboratory until l948, when he exchanged his appoint in chemistry for a chair in social studies that was specifically created for him. He eventually became a member of the British Royal Society and a fellow of Merton College, Oxford.
He is the author of many books including Science, Faith, and Society and The Tacit Dimension. The present volume is based on Polanyi’s Gifford Lectures of 1951-1952, in which he talks about objectivity, probability, randomness, chance and order, doubt, and evolution. The book is not a monograph but a collection of essays written largely for professional audiences.
In his reflections on the nature of scientific explanation, Polanyi targets a series of “isms” that dominated mid-20th-century philosophy of science, especially positivism and a kind of Kantian idealism.
Personal Knowledge is primarily an enquiry into the nature and justification of scientific knowledge. A realist in the classical sense, Polanyi will say, “An empirical statement is true to the extent that it reveals an aspect of reality, a reality largely hidden from us and existing therefore independently of our knowing it.” All assertions of natural fact empirically uncovered are necessarily universal in intent.
Polanyi takes exception to the usual view that scientific knowledge is detached and impersonal in nature. Scientific knowledge, he maintains, is probable knowledge and depends on a kind of tacit knowledge, the unspecified and unarticulated knowledge among scientists that is not susceptible to language.
Science, he notes, is social in its very essence, in the way skills and standards and tacit understanding are transmitted from person to person in an institutional system in which members act freely within mutual consensus.
Yet there is always a subjective element, even in mathematics. We can understand mathematics, for example, only if we acknowledge our own tacit contribution to its formulation. All proofs and theorems advanced by a mathematician have been discovered as a result of the mathematician’s intuitive anticipation of where the equations may lead.
In the concluding section of the book, “Knowing and Being,” Polanyi uses his knowledge of the embryological development in animal consciousness and intelligence to argue that neither consciousness nor intelligence can be explained by chemistry and physics alone.
Distancing himself from Neo-Darwinians, he insists that “within biological evolution there is an ordering of action that operates within the random fluctuations of environmental conditions.” Consciousness and intelligence are the results of emergence from lower to higher levels of life.
Here Polanyi aligns himself with the Jesuit philosopher and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, whose concept of noogenesis is presented in Teilhard’s posthumously published Le phenomene human (1955). The slightly altered English version of Teilhard’s text appeared subsequently as The Phenomenon of Man.
Many of Polanyi’s essays would lead one to believe that he held a natural law conception of the universe, but to the contrary, he maintains that “[t]he evolutionary process is neither predetermined from the start nor the result of an external creative agency.”
Although the essays that make up this volume were written for fellow natural scientists and philosophers of science, there are many that may command the attention of the layman, especially those in which he is talking about the Copernican revolution, reasonable and unreasonable doubt in a court of law, Christian mysticism, and first and final causes.
Polanyi would no doubt allow his principles of interpretation to be utilized in addressing his own work.
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